Volume 3, Issue 4

For this special issue of Intercultural Pragmatics , we have selected articles by authors who were trained in the French tradition in pragmatics (hereafter FTP). Some had been students of the main figure in FTP, Oswald Ducrot. However, none of the articles are truly representative of the current state of FTP, not only because the contributors' scientific paths have taken them in different directions, but also because the influence of FTP has been in decline.

The following paper provides an overview of the origins of the French tradition in pragmatics (FTP). This linguistic tradition originated in the French structuralist paradigm, mainly in the work of Saussure and Benveniste. This contribution presents a general survey of the work of one of the most famous French pragmaticists, Oswald Ducrot. Ducrot's work on argumentative scale, presupposition, negation, and polyphony are all explored. According to Ducrot, the general comprehension procedure of an utterance is called Y-Theory, and belongs to what is known as “integrated pragmatics” (pragmatics integrated with semantics). His way of describing and explaining meaning is similar to Gricean pragmatics in terms of his usage of discourse rules, which are equivalent to Grice's maxims of conversation. However, the design of the general comprehension procedure defines FTP as a framework belonging to a different scientific paradigm. The paper concludes with a section on the relationship between current work on pragmatic markers originating in FTP (connectives, referential expressions, prepositions, tenses) and the new lexical pragmatic framework developed by Deirdre Wilson and Robyn Carston within relevance theory.

The paper addresses intercultural variability in argumentation, and, more specifically, the variation in the judgments concerning the reasonableness of arguments across cultures. Such variability represents a key issue in intercultural communication, and, at the same time, has been taken as an argument for logical relativism. A brief review of the contrastive discourse analysis literature, and, in particular, of the Contrastive Rhetoric tradition, shows that there is considerable vagueness with respect to whether cultural variation in argumentation concerns the logic proper or other levels of discourse organization. The paper argues that a conceptual framework based on argumentation theory and inferential pragmatics allows for the identification of two likely sites for cross-cultural variability of pragmatic, extra-logical, origin: (1) the reliance of natural enthymematic argument on the recovery of implicit premises from a common ground of culturally shared assumptions (endoxa); and (2) the functioning of the dialogue games in which argumentation appears and their embedding in culturally specific social contexts. In order to account for (1), in particular, a model of the interplay between argumentation and inference is presented, which introduces a key distinction between pragmatic (communicative) inferences and argumentative (commmunicated) inferences.

This paper examines the reasons for a frequent intercultural misunderstanding between Africans and Westerners with regard to promising. After studying the conditions of use for the act of promising in each culture, I look at the cultural premises underlying these conditions of use for the act of promising in each culture. I argue that the notions of sincerity and commitment so closely attached to the Western promise stem in fact from the deeper level of Western cultural premises and that the African promise is typically informed by different cultural premises, even though commitment can be attached to an African promise through a verbal negotiation. In order to clarify whether the African promise can still be called an illocutionary act of promising, it is examined in the light of Searle's felicity conditions for the promise. Concerning its place in conversational structure, the African promise appears to be used as a means to politely close a verbal exchange. Finally, looking at lexical expressions for designating the act of promising in a number of West African languages reveals that the non-binding and the binding promise are referred to by speech act verbs from different illocutionary classes, thus confirming that the polite promise and the binding promise are different illocutionary acts.

This paper is concerned with what is too often seen as the inevitable clash of civilizations between Western and Muslim peoples and nations. I argue against Quine's pessimistic conclusions regarding radical translation and in favor of Davidson's principle of charity, according to which communication can only be possible when each communicator takes the other party to be rational. I argue against the view that Muslims, including Muslim terrorists, are of necessity irrational, plead for a more charitable approach to their views of the relations between the West and Islam, criticize Huntington's view on the so-called clash of civilizations, and reject the notion of it as an unavoidable event. I then point out that other ways of dealing with the problem of Muslim terrorism are possible, ways that take into account the public opinion in the Muslim countries rather than relying on sheer force. From that point of view, I advocate a policy based on the Prisoner's Dilemma solution to the promotion of cooperation.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of two factors on the way people address conflicting information. One relates to culture and the other to the communicative context in which contradiction occurs. We compared two theoretical approaches, one that focuses on the former factor—the culturalist approach—and one that focuses on the latter factor—the evolutionary approach. According to the culturalist approach, the way we deal with contradiction can be markedly affected by culture, so that people from cultural environments with different social practices are more or less inclined to accept contradictions. In particular, this approach predicts that Easterners are more likely to search for a compromise between two conflicting view-points than Westerners, who tend to follow a logical principle of non-contradiction. In contrast, the evolutionary approach considers that when contradiction occurs in a communicative context, universal mechanisms designed to deal with the problem of managing deceptive information go into effect and lead to the tendency of giving more weight to one's own belief than to the other's conflicting view. We tested these two approaches with Japanese and French participants. Our data supports the evolutionary approach, since both groups showed the same bias of favoring one's own position when it was challenged by another's.